The Han Dynasty

How far can a youth-culture idol tweak China’s establishment?

Blogger, best-selling novelist, essayist, race-car driver, and Byronic gadfly, Han Han has come to represent the skepticism of his generation.

Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser / INSTITUTE

In December, 1999, a publisher in Shanghai received a handwritten manuscript by a first-time author named Han Han, who had recently dropped out of tenth grade. He had spent more than a year writing a novel, “Triple Door,” in the back of the classroom, on his way to flunking seven courses. It was the story of a Chinese high-school student slogging through “hours of endless emptiness,” copying lessons “from the blackboard to the notebook to the exam,” while his mother fed him pills intended to boost his I.Q. Another publisher had pronounced it gloomy and out of step with the times—books about Chinese youth were more often akin to “Harvard Girl,” a road map to the Ivy League—but an editor was enthusiastic and printed thirty thousand copies. They sold out in three days. Another thirty thousand copies were printed, and they sold out, too.

In the global canon of teen-angst literature, the novel was tame, but in China it was unprecedented: a scathingly realistic satire of education and authority, written by a nobody. China Central Television moved to tamp down the frenzy with an hour-long discussion on its national broadcast. But on TV Han Han projected insolent glamour, with a boy-band shag haircut that swept down and across his left eye. When educators in tweeds and ties fulminated against “rebelliousness” that “might contribute to social instability,” Han smiled, cut them off, and said, “From the sound of it, your life experience has been even shallower than mine.” He was instantly famous—a seductive spokesman for a new brand of youthful defiance, which the Chinese press dubbed “Han Han fever.”

“Triple Door” went on to sell more than two million copies, putting it among China’s best-selling novels of the past two decades. In the next several years, Han published four more novels and several essay collections faithful to his subjects: teen-agers, girls, and cars. They have sold millions more, though his current publisher, Lu Jinbo, does not hail them as great literature. “His novels usually had a beginning but no end,” Lu told me recently. Five years ago, Han started blogging, and his focus took an unmistakable turn toward some of China’s most sensitive matters: Party corruption, censorship, the exploitation of young workers, pollution, the gap between the rich and the poor. It was as if Stephenie Meyer had abandoned the “Twilight” series and started directing fans’ attention to the misuse of public funds.

Han proved even more successful online than in print. In 2008, he surpassed a movie star to become China’s most popular personal blogger. His site—a simple chronicle in the style of a diary, on a powder-blue background with a photograph of a yellow-Lab puppy in the corner—has had nearly half a billion visitors since it began. Only Chinese stock-tip bloggers have drawn more.

Once or twice a week, Han takes the highway from downtown Shanghai to the suburban village where he grew up in a farmhouse now occupied by his grandparents. “As soon as I started making money from writing, I started buying sports cars” and racing, he said, as we inched through rush-hour traffic recently. We were in a roomy black GMC van, with captain’s seats and tinted windows, driven by Han’s confidante and rally partner, Sun Qiang. (Han keeps the van for long trips; he is afraid of flying.) “Other drivers looked down on me, because they thought, You’re a writer; you’re supposed to be driving into walls,” he said.

At twenty-eight, Han stands five feet eight inches tall and weighs less than a hundred and thirty pounds; he has the soft cheekbones of a Korean soap star and glittering black eyes shaded by sheepdog bangs. He favors a uniform of grays and whites and denim—Chinese pop culture’s prevailing aesthetic. His manicured, swaggering persona is a rebuke to the rumpled archetype of the Chinese intellectual, and owes equal debts to Kerouac and Timberlake. In person, he is warm and laconic, and speaks through a smile that tends to camouflage the searing edge of his comments.

On the spectrum of Chinese dissent, Han holds a commanding but highly ambiguous position. At times, his is one of China’s most outspoken voices. (“How many evil things has China Central Television done in the past? Replacing truth with lies, manipulating public opinion, desecrating culture, abusing facts, concealing wrongdoing, covering up problems, and creating fake images of harmony.” That post, like many of his, was struck down by censors, though fans reached it first and circulated it broadly.) He can also be calculatingly elliptical. When Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese writer, won the Nobel Peace Prize last October, Han Han toyed with censors and readers by posting nothing but a pair of quotation marks enclosing an empty space. The post drew one and a half million hits and more than twenty-eight thousand comments.

His criticism places him in frequent combat with China’s armies of online nationalists. Last December, a fervently pro-government Web site listed him among the “slaves of the West” and superimposed a noose on his picture. Thus far, he has maintained a fitful détente with the government. When unrest swept North Africa and the Middle East last winter, the Party launched the most intense crackdown on free expression in years. After the detention of the politically provocative artist Ai Weiwei, on April 3rd—he was accused of unspecified “economic crimes”—the writer Ma Jian speculated in an op-ed piece printed outside China that the next targets would be Han and three other prominent critics. “The regime will not stop the persecution until the only voices to be heard are its own ‘official’ artists,” Ma wrote.

For nearly a decade, Han Han has maintained a parallel career as a race-car driver, with a respectable record in circuit competition for Shanghai’s Volkswagen team and in off-road rally races for Subaru. It is a world of sponsorships and champagne showers, disorientingly at odds with his writing life. By and large, his readers care nothing for auto racing, but the overlapping identities have yielded a singular celebrity: Han adorns the covers of style magazines while independent Web sites—Han Han Digest, Danwei, ChinaGeeks—translate and analyze his utterances. At times, his readers hang on his words even before he utters them. On Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, he once typed a single entry—“Wei” (“Hello”)—and three-quarters of a million followers signed up to await his next one. (He has yet to return.) He began a television interview recently by saying “If you speak Chinese, you know who I am”—a boast not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

He is the only government critic with corporate sponsorship—he has advertising contracts with Vancl, a low-cost clothing chain, and with Johnnie Walker, which pairs his brooding image with the line “Dreaming is realizing every idea that flashes through one’s mind.” He has lent his name to a one-of-a-kind luxury Swiss watch by Hublot, which was auctioned for charity and inscribed, in English, “For Freedom.”

Approaching Han’s home town, Tinglin, we branched off onto smaller roads until we confronted a creek spanned by a concrete bridge that was only inches wider than the van. At the wheel, Sun Qiang hesitated. Han peered through the gap between the front seats, and adopted a mock-serious tone: “This bridge is the test!” We crossed intact. “I’ve had mishaps there many times,” Han said.

Mist hung over fallow fields crisscrossed by footpaths. The fringe of Shanghai, like those of other big cities, is a patchwork of small farms and factories, a short drive from staggering wealth. We reached a two-story brick farmhouse, fronted by a small plot. Han’s grandparents—small, swaddled in padded cotton clothes—ambled out to greet us. A golden retriever went berserk. We passed through a living room that carried the cold damp of the countryside, and reëmerged in a small courtyard, where Han smiled awkwardly and indicated for me to climb through a window into his wing of the house. “A small design flaw,” he said. “We didn’t put a door on this side.”

Within was a rural teen-ager’s fantasy lair: a beat-up Yamaha motorcycle leaned against one wall, a mammoth television screen against another. A second giant screen was accessorized with a steering wheel and pedals set up for driving games. In the center of the room was a pool table, and Han racked up the balls and broke. He is in constant, restless motion. To indicate his rare and full attention, he turns both of his phones face down, as they buzz and bleat in protest. On the pool table, I made a shot, then flubbed the second. He sank the rest.

The transformation of his home town figures prominently in Han’s view of China. In writing and conversation, he returns repeatedly to the connection between individual aspirations and unaccountable local governments. Explaining why many of his grandparents’ neighbors have accepted modest payments from the state to give up valuable land, he said, “People will do anything to get a small apartment in town. It doesn’t matter if it’s only eighty square metres, they’ll take it, because it means they’ve gone from country people to city people.” He went on, “And then the government will level the buildings, and sell that land to a factory or real-estate developer who might build apartments to sell to others.”

Under different circumstances, that would be a path for improving the neighborhood, but, with little oversight, local officials have few incentives to insure that new factories pay good salaries or protect the land. Han indicated a tall industrial compound in the distance, a chemical manufacturer, which he blames for fouling the stream where he used to hunt for crawfish. On his blog, he once wrote:

My grandfather can identify the day of the week by the color of the water. The stench is everywhere. The Environmental Protection Bureau says the water quality is normal, though the river is full of dead fish. . . . At various points, my home town has planned to build Asia’s largest industrial harbor, and Asia’s largest outdoor sculpture garden, and Asia’s largest electronics shopping center. So far, all it has produced is thousands of acres of rubble, unfinished and wasted.

We wandered out in the cold, and I mentioned that his criticism can sound at odds with his reputation as the avatar of a generation raised in the most prosperous period in Chinese history. He said the scale of China’s growth obscures the details of how the spoils have been divided. “For rally competitions we travel widely, because they’re on gravel roads, often in small, poor places. Young people there don’t care about literature or art or film or freedom or democracy, but they know they need one thing: justice. What they see around them is unfair.”

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a news clip he’d seen recently about a seventeen-year-old migrant worker who stood in the aisle of a train for sixty-two hours to get home. It was the kind of ordeal that Chinese papers regularly feature as a portrait of fortitude. But Han had come to see it differently. “The guy had to wear adult diapers,” he said, appalled. It became the basis of his next blog post, three days later, about “young people used by the process of urbanization.” The post concluded, “Work for a whole year, stand in line for a whole day, buy a full-price ticket, wear diapers, stand the whole way home—how dignified!”

On the days that Han writes, he sleeps until midday and usually works—fast and alone—into the pre-dawn hours. He is married to Lily Jin, a high-school friend who is chic and circumspect. She serves as his assistant and gatekeeper. “Han Han trusts people very easily, almost credulously,” she told me. “In the past, he’s been cheated by other publishers, and lost money because of it.” They had a daughter last year, an event greeted by the Chinese gossip magazines with all the ceremony of a royal siring (“Han Han Becomes a Father, Talks for First Time About Daughter”). Han rarely gets through an interview without volunteering that he still has “girlfriends,” as in “I want to stay in this country; my girlfriends are here.” But it’s difficult to know how much of the towel-snapping is a glib deflection. Pressed for specifics, he says, “I like to watch other people’s lives, but I don’t like people to peek into mine.”

He is a proudly self-described “country bumpkin,” prone to ham-fisted asides, such as his declaration that women directors should stick to films “about love or life.” (He says he meant to refer only to Hu Mei, the director of a Party-backed bio-pic of Confucius.) Unlike other prominent Chinese critics of the government, he has few ties to the West; he has visited Europe but not America, and cares little for Western literature. He is still acclimating to attention from abroad. Simon & Schuster plans to publish a volume of essays and blog posts in English translation next fall, to be followed by a novel.

Han long ago recognized his “rebel” identity as a cliché. “If I were a rebel, I wouldn’t drive an Audi or a BMW,” he once told a reporter. Yet it endures; even China Daily, a state-backed English-language paper, heralded Han’s busy schedule with the headline “REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE.” Actually, when he isn’t racing, the rebel keeps quiet rhythms: he doesn’t smoke, barely drinks, and has no interest in night clubs.

Han is almost reflexively described as a symbol of China’s youth, which is not an unalloyed compliment. He hails from the first generation born after Mao and the advent of the one-child policy—the baling hou, or “post-’80 generation”—which serves as a reference point in discussions of values and the national character much the way that baby boomers do for Americans: a generation that came of age amid radical social transformations which alienated its members from their parents and left them either newly self-aware or self-indulgent, depending on who’s talking.

Han’s parents worked for the government: his mother, Zhou Qiaorong, dispensed benefits at a local welfare office; his father, Han Renjun, had aspirations to write fiction, but ended up at a local Party newspaper, an editor with little appetite for advancement. “He didn’t like the kind of life in which you have to drink every day and kiss your leaders’ asses,” his son said. Before the parents knew if they were having a boy or a girl, they agreed to name the baby Han Han, the father’s abandoned pen name. In recent years, their son’s heckling of the establishment complicated their government jobs; he offered to support them financially, and they took early retirement.

Han was a fidgety, outdoorsy child, but his father stacked the household’s best literature on low shelves, where the boy could reach it; the political tracts stayed up high. “I usually tell people that I don’t read, but of course that’s impossible,” he told me. “I also tell other race-car drivers that I never practice, but I do, secretly.” Reading the Chinese classics alienated him from his school curriculum. “I don’t believe anyone who truly loves literature can also love Mao Zedong,” he said. “These two things are incompatible. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers.”

A gifted long-distance runner, Han gained admission to Songjiang No. 2 High School. He wrote occasionally, and when he was sixteen he heard that a Shanghai magazine was looking for young writers to enter the New Concept Essay Contest. He’d entered contests before. “You’d be asked to write about something that you’d done that was good—say, helping an old lady across the street or returning a lost wallet. Never mind that the more realistic scenario would be you putting the wallet in your pocket.” But New Concept intended to be different, and Han’s assignment in the final round was abstract: A judge dropped a plain piece of paper into an empty glass—that was the topic. “I had some random idea about how the paper falling to the bottom of the glass tells you about life,” he told me, adding, “All bullshit.” He took first place. (The essay still circulates among fans.)

At another moment in Chinese history, he might have been sidelined for his idiosyncrasies, but in 1999 China was being bombarded by new ideas. Internet use had begun a steep rise—the number of Chinese users quadrupled that year—and a climate of openness prevailed as the country prepared to join the World Trade Organization.

The year Han won the essay contest, he failed his courses and was held back. On the verge of failing again, he dropped out, which made him desperate to publish his manuscript, “to prove myself,” he said. “I had told my classmates and teacher that I was a good writer and I could make a living from it, but they said I was crazy.” After “Triple Door” was published and Han Han fever took hold, the book became more than simply a critique of China’s education system. It electrified young people, because Han’s very existence gave them “the right to choose their own idol,” as the Shanghai writer Chen Cun put it.

Han was out-earning his parents, but he was bored. Everyone his age was in school, and he gravitated to a high-speed go-cart track in Shanghai—“the only place for entertainment that wasn’t prostitution or gambling,” as he put it. A friend in Beijing insisted that he could find sponsors to form a racing team. Han moved north to the capital, part of a vast tide of hopefuls surging in from around the country. They lived as rebels, but with limits. After midnight, he’d speed down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, beside Tiananmen Square, stopping at every red light.

“Every night, we sat together in a bar, debating, ‘Should we buy Ferraris or Porsches? Because pretty soon we’ll be rich!’ ” But in the end his friend’s assurances were nonsense. “In two years, the only sponsorship he ever got was from the convenience store downstairs, which provided one case of mineral water,” Han said.

Han eventually won a spot on a team and earned a reputation on the track for prudence. “He makes more calculations when he is preparing to take a risk,” his teammate Wang Rui told me. Sun Qiang, Han’s navigator, said the most difficult moments to manage are when drivers fall behind: “They tend to get impulsive, to try to catch up. When that happens, one can become irrational.” Han silenced doubts about his seriousness as a driver in 2007, when he won the China Circuit Car Championship. None of the drivers I met have the remotest interest in his writing life. “I’d rather know as little as possible,” Sun said.

Han stayed in Beijing for four years, driving and writing; volumes of his essays included “Press Release 2003” and, in 2005, “And I Drift,” as well as the novels “Like a Speeding Youth” (2002), about a pair of struggling ghost writers, and “Riot in Chang’an City” (2004), the story of a reluctant martial-arts master. His books, often marketed under brooding dark covers, were moody and observant, but none could recapture the energy of his début. In truth, he didn’t enjoy writing. Writing subsidized his racing. “Wrecking a car might mean I’d be forced to write a book to dupe my readers,” he wrote later.

In 2005, five years after his literary début, Han was low on cash and feuding with a publishing house over royalties and piracy. Then he encountered Lu Jinbo, a writer turned publisher. Seven years his senior, Lu was a businessman, partial to pinstripes and blustery declarations. He had unvarnished advice for Han: “His image as a ‘problem child’ was out of style. People were no longer so curious about him,” Lu said. Lu saw the makings of a splashy new deal: he offered Han an advance on his next book of two million yuan, about a quarter of a million dollars—colossal by Chinese standards. The contract made headlines and confirmed Lu as the father of what he calls “astronomical advances.”

I met Lu for a beer at a bookstore-café after a reading by another of his authors, and his manner put me in mind of Don King: he rhapsodized about Han’s intellect, compared him to Nelson Mandela, and predicted that universities will one day teach “Han studies.” He also offered his views on what he called “the brand.” “Han Han is a social phenomenon, a cultural idol, and even a bit of a semi-religious leader,” Lu said. “Religious in the sense that you don’t need a specific reason to like Han Han.” He drew a distinction between Han’s devotees and those of Yao Ming, the first Chinese all-star in the N.B.A. “His talents will be gone someday—but Han Han’s? His fans like everything about him.”

“I wanted him to become a critic and a thinker, with the image of a good kid,” Lu told Youth Weekend, a Chinese magazine. First, they ditched Han’s black cover art in favor of bright white, and he urged Han to follow his interest in pop music. To those tempted to see Han as a dilettante, it didn’t help his case when he recorded a pop album in 2006 called “18 Jin,” the Chinese equivalent of “Rated R.” The lyrics were decidedly P.G. (“Happiness is being happy in different ways.”) These days, Lu says the reinvention was not his idea. “He’s got his own ideas on everything,” Lu told me. “He won’t change for others, even when he’s wrong. For instance, he’s extremely lazy, and he’s always late. But he refuses to change. He’s got girlfriends, but he won’t change, even when he’s caught by his wife. He wastes money and drives himself into financial trouble, but he won’t change. All of this shows that he’s stubborn. Or, one might say, free.”

Summing up Han’s appeal, Lu said that he stands out from other pop figures because of a rare asset. “In China, our culture forces us to say things that we don’t really think. If I say, ‘Please come over to my place for dinner today,’ the truth is I don’t really want you to come. And you’ll say, ‘You’re too kind, but I have other arrangements.’ This is the way people are used to communicating, whether it’s leaders in the newspaper or regular people. All Chinese people understand that what you say and what you think often don’t match up. But Han Han isn’t like this. He doesn’t consider other people’s feelings and just says what’s on his mind, or he’ll say nothing.” In short, Lu said, “If Han Han says, ‘This is true,’ then ten million fans will say, ‘This is true.’ If he says ‘This is fake,’ then it’s fake.”

When Han Han began blogging, five years ago, he embraced the Web primarily as a realm for combat. A literary critic, Bai Ye, questioned the work of young writers, and Han responded with a screed titled “The Literary Circle Is One Big Fart: Don’t Be Pretentious.” He pilloried popular musicians, contemporary poets, and the rigidities of the national writers’ association. One of his earliest supporters, the culture writer Xie Xizhang, recanted, telling the press, “If I were Han Han’s father, I would smack him in the mouth.” (Han’s fans inundated Xie’s blog with caustic comments.) “I was swept up in the novelty of everyone arguing,” Han says now. “I began to realize later that the arguments were pointless; many of those with whom you’re arguing actually share a common enemy.”

But it was a freak event that truly jolted him. During a race in Russia in June, 2008, his mentor, Xu Lang, then China’s best rally driver, was trying to unearth a car from the mud when he was struck in the face and killed by a tow hook. His wife, at home, was pregnant with their first child. Han was devastated. As distant as it was from his writing life, the accident stoked his fixation on injustice. “Good people die, bad people enjoy a good long life without punishment. It made me want to live more fully, to be a good person and to punish those who are not,” he told me. “If we wanted a better China, we couldn’t sit around and wait.”

Online, he lampooned the self-importance of officialdom, asking why the government lowered the flags after the deaths of politicians but not after disasters that claimed many civilian lives. (“I have a Chinese-style solution: flagpoles should be doubled in height. This will satisfy all sides.”) He flicked at rumors that senior leaders had high-priced mistresses. (“If you spend a hundred yuan on a woman’s intimate services, it’s obscene; if you spend a million, it’s refined.”) He mocked the Party strategy of trying to drum up support by plastering the Web with pro-government messages. (“Just because you see people clustered eating shit doesn’t make you want to squeeze your way in for a mouthful.”)

He excelled at “edge ball,” the Chinese writers’ term, drawn from Ping-Pong, for grazing the limits with a ball without missing the table. The Chinese Web was a laboratory for a new era of black political humor, and it did not require him to pretend that he held policy prescriptions. Vivid and bawdy, the posts were celebrated not for originality but for saying what so many others only thought.

Even as Han criticized China’s stifling of expression, his visibility reflected how much wider the realm of Chinese intellectual life had become over the past decade. For every writer still barred from travelling abroad, and every novel prevented from publication, another popped up unmolested in a third- or fourth-tier city that was once a cultural desert. At the end of 2007, the number of bloggers had more than doubled since the previous year, and though they risked jail for what they wrote, their cumulative power could not be ignored. In 2009, when the government announced that new computers would be shipped with a filtering software called Green Dam, Chinese users revolted. They argued that its porn filter, for instance, was so shoddy that it blocked images even of Party leaders whose portraits featured large patches of skin. Facing a backlash from computer makers as well, the government retreated; Green Dam—“a policeman stationed inside the house,” as Han put it to me—was abruptly scaled back.

Han focussed on bread-and-butter issues, railing against the waste of taxpayer dollars on new road signs in Shanghai, and pointing out, after a deadly high-rise fire, that the city of skyscrapers still had “water cannons that reach only six or seven floors.” When young nationalists demonstrated against Japan, he wrote, “Protests against foreigners by those who aren’t allowed to protest at home are utterly worthless.” Over and over, he took a populist line to jab at the shibboleths that China promotes, urging workers not to cheer headlines of new prosperity when their “low-wage labor adds up to nothing but a single screw in the boss’s Rolls-Royce.” (“Why are our politicians able to stand on the world stage, playing political chess games, honing their politics? Because of you, the low-wage worker.”) After a forty-seven-year-old woman burned herself to death to stop a crew that was trying to demolish her home, he wrote, “If you have not burned yourself to ashes . . . if all your family members are alive, that’s the standard of a happy life.”

Censoring Han was not a simple matter. Unlike taking down an obscure scholar’s manifesto, censoring his blogs affected legions of casual Internet users who might otherwise never bother to venture in search of something outside the filtered world. It signalled, as Han explained to me, that “there is something that you really don’t want me to know, so now I really want to know it.” A generation of his fans was learning that “whatever you’re trying to cover up becomes the truth.” In a widely circulated speech in February, 2010, Han said, “I can’t write about the police, I can’t write about the leaders, I can’t write about policies, I can’t write about the system, I can’t write about the judiciary, I can’t write about many pieces of history, I can’t write about Tibet, I can’t write about Xinjiang, I can’t write about mass assemblies, I can’t write about demonstrations, I can’t write about pornography, I can’t write about censorship, I can’t write about art.”

His comments attracted a range of readers who might have once dismissed him as a youth craze. Li Haipeng, an admired columnist and novelist, told me that Han had “seized another channel of communication” that allowed him to attract a more sophisticated audience. “You have to understand that people like my friends and me probably wouldn’t like to admit we are influenced by Han Han, but we must admit that we are,” Li said. The Open Constitution Initiative, a group of Beijing-based scholars who advocate legal reform, gave Han an award in 2008 for his “exemplary contribution to protecting citizen rights.” Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer who helped make the selection, told me, “We saw him as the archetypal modern citizen.” In April, 2010, Time picked Han as a candidate for its annual list of the world’s most influential people. Selection hinged on a public vote, and his fans orchestrated a campaign, including an illustrated guide to voting that used photographs to allow non-English-speaking readers to navigate Time’s Web site. Soon the combination of “Han Han” and “Time” was blocked by Chinese search engines, and People’s Daily asked in a headline, “IS TIME MAGAZINE SEVERELY NEARSIGHTED?” On his blog, Han wrote:

Maybe my writings help people vent some anger or resentment. But beyond that what use are they? This “influence” is an illusion. In China, influence belongs only to those with power, those who can make rain from clouds, who can decide if you live or die, those who can keep you somewhere between life and death. They are the people with real influence. . . . We are just small characters beneath a spotlight on the stage. They own the theatre, and they can always bring down the curtain, turn off the lights, close the door, and turn the dogs loose.

He received twenty-five thousand comments, some laced with desperate devotion (“I’m willing to give my life to defend Han Han—a man with courage and integrity”), and the independent-minded newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily took the unusual step of writing an editorial urging readers to vote for Han, because he “has produced a one-man clamor that stands out from the silence of the many.” It concluded, “How can you expect a writer or race-car driver to save you? Han Han is lonely, fighting this battle by himself. He has no shortage of worshippers. What he needs is those who will travel beside him.” In the final online tally, Han came in No. 2 worldwide, behind the Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

In May, 2009, as his popularity soared, Han announced plans for a magazine that would be “wilder and freer” than the offerings on Chinese newsstands. Initially, he chose the name Literary Renaissance, but authorities frowned on it—“ ‘Renaissance’ worried them,” he said—and he decided it was pompous anyway. Facing the first of many delays, he renamed the magazine Duchangtuan (“a chorus of soloists”), with the English name Party.

He hired a staff, and set up shop in a three-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a peach-colored high-rise, paying for much of the operation with the proceeds of his book sales and car racing. Several months later, an early mockup was leaked to the press, including a sketch of a naked man covering his abdomen with a machine gun. Han recalls that one of the people overseeing the publication fretted that the image of a man “covering the center” could be read, in Chinese, as a pun on the “Party Central Committee.” In another feature, he was advised to remove a reference to “eating lamb,” because it might be interpreted as a reference to Uighur unrest in Xinjiang Province. In all, about fifty per cent of the magazine’s original contents were nixed in order to pass inspections, Han estimates. But he maintained the backing of Shuhai Publishing House, an official printer with the power to produce the magazine.

When the first issue of Party appeared, last July, the contents were, by the standards of Han’s blog, eclectic but muted: a hundred and twenty-eight pages of essays and short stories, photographs and cartoons. A blind musician chronicled his train travels; a six-year-old girl published a four-line poem. The cleverest feature was “Everyone Asks Everyone,” a farcical meditation on the way information is obtained (or not), in which readers dreamed up questions—for boyfriends, for government agencies—and editors documented the absurd lengths they had gone to for answers. One of the few overtly political items in Party was a page dedicated to the radiological scan of Ai Weiwei’s skull during a hospitalization for a brain injury that he attributed to a beating by police.

Ten hours after it went on sale, Party was No. 1 in the rankings of Amazon China, the Chinese press reported. Bookstores dedicated separate sales counters to handle the crush. Three days later, according to China Digital Times, an overseas Web site that tracks censorship orders, the Central Propaganda Bureau instructed the Beijing press not to report further on the phenomenon. That didn’t dissuade imitators: newsstands soon stocked Party Tabloid, Party No. 2, Party No. 3, and Party Tomorrow.

The second issue had already been printed, last December, when the publisher received the order to stop. A million copies were pulped. The instruction came by phone from the “relevant departments,” Han said, and the anonymity infuriated him. “I’m out in the sun and you’re in the shadows,” he wrote on his blog, announcing Party’s demise. He laid off the staff, and when we met at his half-deserted office, a couple of weeks later, page proofs and photos still hung on the walls. A bottle of champagne, to celebrate the new issue, remained unopened on a desk. “The computers are still here, so we’re just using them to play games,” he said. The favorite was Call of Duty, a shooter game.

The magazine office where we talked was underheated; Han, in a scarf and sweater, was subdued. He said the end of the magazine was a function of its success. “People got worried. Maybe they thought, Well, you started out as a writer published in our magazines, which we control. Now are you trying to take control?” He added, “Even if this magazine had been about fishing, it would have been a problem.”

His wife poked her head into the office and handed him a takeout bag from McDonald’s. He unwrapped a burger. “Maybe if someone else had done this, instead of me, they would have had more freedom,” he said, as his burger slipped out of the bun and onto the couch. He re-installed it in the bun. Most of all, he regrets what the shutdown says about the vibrancy of Chinese culture. “We can’t always use pandas and tea,” he said. “What else do we have? Silk? The Great Wall? That isn’t China.”

As we spoke, unrest was widening in the Middle East, and Chinese authorities were moving swiftly to block online discussion and to sweep up writers, lawyers, and activists, often without charges. On his blog, Han avoided the subject. Nevertheless, when the Shanghai Party Committee Propaganda Department distributed guidance to the local press, on March 12th, it is said to have included an order not to report on anything about Han beyond his car racing. Such directives are more porous than they sound—stories inevitably seep through—but they can be read as clues to official thinking.

Eventually, Han couldn’t resist addressing the dramas abroad. In late March, Chinese diplomats approved sanctions on Muammar Qaddafi’s regime but abstained from a vote on the no-fly zone, citing, as usual, their reluctance to interfere in another nation’s “internal affairs.” Han wrote, “Dictators have no internal affairs, and slaughterers ought to be invaded and eliminated.”

Among intellectuals, Han is in tensely polarizing. In a widely circulated piece, Leung Man-tou, a Hong Kong writer and television commentator, argued that Han has the makings of “another Lu Xun,” China’s most celebrated social critic. Ai Weiwei, months before his arrest, went a step further, telling a reporter that “Han is more influential than Lu Xun, because his writing can reach more people.” But others recoil at the comparison. Lydia H. Liu, a literature and media scholar at Columbia, said, “Han Han is only a mirror image of the people who like him. So in what ways will that reflection transform them? It will not.” She added, “The first thing you see on his blog is not his writing but a Subaru advertisement.”

The most surprising critique of Han’s work and persona comes from other young Chinese liberals, who contend that his popularity signals, as the author and editor Xu Zhiyuan put it, the “triumph of the age of mediocrity.” At thirty-four, Xu is Han’s aesthetic opposite, with wild Jim Morrison hair and a command of Havel and Milosz. “Han Han rebelled and succeeded—and he made a lot of money,” Xu said over lunch, adding, “He has so many opportunities to experience the wider world, to learn more, but he refuses.” The Web has democratizing potential, but it privileges influence over substance, Xu said, and he compared Han to a YouTube singer: “The songs might be rubbish, but he’ll still sell records.”

Han is succinct about his critics’ response to his blog: “If you like reading it, good, thank you. If you don’t, then goodbye.” But serving as a “mirror” for his fans may in fact be his greatest strength. While China’s boldest intellectuals and dissidents often stand out for being flamboyantly atypical, Han excels at being typical, for allowing his fans to relate to him enough that the principles he espouses feel within reach. His biography bears all the minor victories and indignities, the reasons for aspiration and cynicism, that accompany being young and restless in China today, and this makes him powerful. For two decades, Chinese young people have been apolitical, not simply because the basic conditions of life had improved but also because the alternative was frightening and hopeless. Han’s writing has not reordered the political life of Chinese youth, or forced the hand of policymakers, but he is an effective advertisement for the joys of skepticism.

Over and over this spring, when Han’s fans talked to me about his work, they described it as an awakening—“a shot of adrenaline that awakens us from our apathy,” as a Chinese blogger wrote recently. At a car race, a small, exuberant crowd of fans waited to catch a glimpse of him. Among them was Wei Feiran, a wiry, spiky-haired nineteen-year-old from Anhui Province, who seemed on the verge of levitating with anticipation. He’d read “Triple Door” when he was in tenth grade and was deeply affected by it. He was inspired by Han’s attempt to publish a magazine, and now he and some friends were trying to launch one, too, in the city of Changsha. “I really want to do it well. I’m sort of an idealist,” Wei said. “We are doing it by ourselves, with no company or anybody behind us.” For the inaugural issue, they wanted to interview Han, so Wei had ridden fourteen hours on a train to find him.

For a while, Wei had also helped run a fan site that collected and commented on Han’s blog posts. “We were forced to shut down by the Ningxia Internet Patrol,” Wei said. “Our site had every post he’d ever written, and they said that’s too sensitive.” Overhearing our conversation, a shy girl in an orange sweater interjected, “Han Han represents the person that all of us want to become, and the things that we all want to do but are never brave enough to try.”

Han told me that he has never been “invited for tea,” the euphemism for being contacted or interrogated by authorities. Contacts are indirect; in the case of his magazine, government agencies contact his publishers or his blog host. He described a case: “I received a phone call from a police official, and he says, ‘Sorry, but we have to delete one of your articles.’ I asked, ‘Which one?’ ‘The one you wrote two years ago, about some mayor killing all the dogs in town.’ ” Han figures the piece made somebody, somewhere, look bad. “Back then,” Han says, the official “wasn’t in the position to do anything about it. Now he is.”

Divining how far any individual can go in Chinese creative life is akin to carving a line in the sand at low tide in the dark; the political terrain shifts constantly. Han permits few illusions about his willingness to stay on the safe side of lines he can see. He has never made a move to take his activism from the Web to the street, and he opposes hastening multiparty elections. “The Party will win anyway, because they are rich and they can bribe people,” he said, adding, “Let culture be more vibrant and the media be more open.” Outsiders often confuse the demand for openness with the demand for democracy, but in domestic Chinese politics the difference is essential. Han also knows that his labored distinctions go only so far. “If they’re not happy, you’re out of luck,” he said.

After the demise of his magazine, Han took a couple of months to consider his next venture. Lu, the publisher, volunteered ideas: “We’re thinking about having him do some sort of science-education periodical with topics like ‘What did dinosaurs look like?’ or ‘How do people catch cold?’ ” It was hard to picture. Han talks vaguely about getting involved in film, perhaps something along the dark satirical lines of one of his favorites: “Underground,” the war epic by the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica.

In quieter moments, he recognizes old insecurities in his frenetic pattern of entrepreneurship. “I always feel like I’m scared in some way—not scared of the government but scared of having too little to offer,” he said. “I always think I should be doing more—writing more, winning more.” One area in which he has permitted himself to slow down lately is his fiction. His latest novel, “1988: I Want to Talk with the World,” is more focussed and compassionate than previous work, and was warmly received. Where in the past his characters sanctified disaffection, his latest narrator—a man on a road trip to retrieve a friend from prison—speaks admiringly of “hot-blooded people” who exude intensity and never shy from responsibilities. “I hope I will become one of them,” the narrator says. Han acknowledges a change in tone. “In previous books, I wanted my readers to love every single page, to laugh at the jokes, to be impressed with every detail,” he said. “I’ve done enough of that. I’m starting to write real fiction.” Some of his adolescent affectations are fading now that he is in his late twenties, and though he clings to his excited claims about womanizing, fatherhood is one of the few things he admits to regarding seriously. “I’ve accomplished my job as a human being,” he said before a car race in April, when asked about his daughter. “I don’t feel any pressure anymore, even if I knew I was going to die in this race.”

The first race of the touring-car season was on a Sunday in April, at the Shanghai Tianma Circuit, a track in the suburbs. Touring cars look like souped-up street vehicles, rather than the open-wheel racers of Formula One, and for the Shanghai 333 Racing Club Han drives a Volkswagen Polo hatchback.

A couple of days before the race, Han was in the team tent, curled up in a tan armchair, texting on a black iPhone and whispering into a white Nokia. The air carried the scent of oil and rubber, and the sound of cars buzzing through turns like angry bees. He wore a silvery racing suit that advertised Volkswagen across his midsection, Red Bull along his cuffs, and Homark Aluminum Alloy Wheels on his right biceps. Race-car drivers strutted in and out, flicking open the tent flaps like sultans in old movies.

Han was ending a turbulent month. He had joined a group of writers who accused the Web site Baidu of allowing users to upload millions of pirated books, and he released an open letter to Baidu’s C.E.O., Robin Li, who ranks as China’s richest man. Han chided him for enjoying “private planes and luxury yachts” while “wresting intellectual property from our hands,” and he ended on a confrontational note: If Baidu “refuses to step back, then I might take a few steps forward, until one day soon you might look down from your office in Beijing and see me standing there.” Within a week, Baidu had removed millions of books from its site. “Han Han Wins,” a publishing blog declared.

But Han’s talk of “steps forward” did not go unnoticed. A person close to Han described receiving a phone call from a government official, who asked, “What is that line? Is he going to do something out in the street? Please tell Han Han that if you’re in the building we don’t care, but don’t go outside the building.”

Baidu was an easy target, Han said, and then he brought up a harder case. “For Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, we can do nothing,” he said. Ai had been detained the previous weekend—the most noteworthy high-profile arrest since the crackdown began. The government had yet to say where he was being held or what would become of him. (Last week, he was allowed to return home.) Han chose his words carefully: “If the government thinks Ai is a big problem, it should say so; they have the power if they want to arrest him. It’s O.K. if everybody knows what’s happening. The reason they gave was ‘economic crimes.’ Ai is an artist and he is famous, so if you want to say he committed ‘economic crimes’ you need to show us the evidence.”

A widely circulated essay in Han’s name asked, “Who among us will speak out now on behalf of Ai Weiwei?” But the essay was a hoax; Han didn’t write it. The speed with which it circulated spoke eloquently about the power of others’ projections. (Writing in Chinese about Ai’s arrest was “useless,” Han told me, because “the system can automatically block the name.”) Moreover, comparing Han and Ai obscures important differences in their audiences and their tactics. Han says, “Ai’s criticism is more direct and he is more persistent on a single issue. For me, I criticize one thing, make them feel terrible, and if they ask me to stop talking about it, then I’ll criticize something else. We have a hundred things to talk about.”

In the days after Ai’s arrest, it had become fashionable in Beijing’s creative circles to whisper that he and Liu Xiaobo were messianic, with little impact on the real priorities of ordinary Chinese. Han thinks it’s naïve to judge them simply by popularity: “This has nothing to do with ‘impact,’ because the government doesn’t allow them to have impact.”

The day of the race was overcast and airless, but the racetrack scene was festive. Flocks of gangly models had arrived, in fractional vinyl outfits—Volkswagen miniskirts, Kia crop tops—and they loped along in go-go boots while shy car guys photographed them from a distance with their phones. Before the race, Han and his team were expected at a Volkswagen press event, which had disco lights, dance music, and a screen bearing the message “PoloYourLife.” Break dancers contorted around a hatchback, and the drivers lined up on stools, like bachelors on a game show, to chat with the host. Later, I asked Han how sponsorships square with his stance as an outsider, and he said corporate ties are different from “the powerful interests I oppose on my blog.” Then he turned the question around, and asked about American journalism, “Can’t you be independent, and free of influence, and still rely on advertising?” Han doesn’t like carrying the ads on his site, he said, but entrusting his work to a conventional Chinese publication would give the authorities another lever with which to silence him.

When it was time for the race, Han pulled a black Red Bull helmet over his head and eased into his car. The windows bore decals with his number—15—and his blood type (O positive). The driver’s seat was a claustrophobic black bucket with a red six-point harness. Cars roared out of the start and into a crash on the first turn. When competition resumed, Han was in eighth place. He drifted farther back, passed by No. 21, then No. 8, then No. 5. His car had a mechanical problem. On the fifth lap, he crawled back to the pits.

When I found him later, he was watching the race through the chain-link fence along the pit lane, as if nothing had happened. The team had been testing a new engine, and it failed, he explained. But it was only the first race of the season. “There’s still time,” he said. It reminded me of the day he told me about the end of his magazine. “Right now, the other team has the lead,” he said. “Temporarily.” He flashed the full spokesman’s smile, broad and serene. “And, besides, I’m younger. I can live to watch them die.” ♦

The agent’s dismissal gives the appearance that the agency buckled under political pressure, and sets a highly disturbing precedent.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.